(A/N: Volume 2 starts, how are you guys doing? Leave likes and comments!)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
You have leveled up!
Level: 1 → 2
You have gained 1 Attribute Point.
Assign now?
→ Yes / No
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Ken’s eyes cracked open to a red window sitting patiently in his vision, like it had been there for a while, waiting for him to notice.
“...Huh.” His voice came out as more of a croak than actual words. He tried again. “Um, hello?”
The cubicle ceiling above him was the water-stained gray he had yet to get used to. Nothing about Rancho Coronado had changed. Only, judging by how his stomach felt like it had eaten itself twice over and started complaining once again, quite a bit of time had passed.
He fumbled for his holo. The date blinked up first, before the time.
Saturday.
“...Ok,” Ken stared at it for a long moment. “Ok, that’s, that’s fine. Totally fine. I definitely remember Friday being a long Friday. Somewhere.”
Meeting the girl he only stared at from a distance. Doing a rather profitable heist. Being invited to a girl’s house and then almost getting his face slammed, tracing his own footsteps back through Little China with the particular steps of a man who had just been thoroughly, comprehensively evicted from a girl’s apartment, and then–
Nothing.
Just, Saturday.
’Right, I did say I felt like I could sleep for a week back at Vik’s clinic. Guess my body took that as a personal challenge.’
He slept from 2100 to 1100. Fourteen damn hours. He’d really been out.
The notification hadn’t moved.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
You have leveled up!
Level: 1 → 2
You have gained 1 Attribute Point.
Assign now?
→ Yes / No
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
“Well, would you look at that,” Ken murmured, pushing away the leftover groginess with sheer grit. “So, I do get attribute points after all? Should’ve given that from the start.”
He knew the Attribute Point (AP) mechanic from the games he played by now. Games with leveling mechanics basically had it, but his first level up didn’t quite give him that hope.
He hesitated over the Yes.
Last time anything system-related handed him a choice without an explanation attached, he’d ended up with a spine that occasionally activated itself out of sheer excitement and a chrome bill that could’ve bought a small building.
It would be strange if he didn’t develop some paranoia.
Don’t get him wrong here. Most gonks used their chromes through the icons and links on their holo, which connects with the neuroport.
Gonks who could use active chrome like they developed an extra limb were 10 in 100, even that came by luck. Accidentally connecting with the exact synapses required to get the cyberware to listen to what you want.
Attribute Point, on the other hand, felt different, and probably was. It can increase anything connected with the attribute without question. Compared to everything else this month had thrown at him, it was the best news he could get.
“...Yes.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
AP: 1
Body: 4 (+)
Reflexes: 4 (+)
Intelligence: 6 (+)
Technical Ability: 5 (+)
Cool: 3 (+)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Ken stared at the numbers like they’d personally challenged him.
Cool sat there at a measly 3, dead last, and if the last week had taught him anything about himself it was that his poker face sucked beyond saving. He’d already choked in front of a principal, a ripperdoc, a stealing netrunner, and Katsuo-fucking-Tanaka, with escalating levels of internal screaming each time.
Then again, Reflexes and Body were the ones that kept him breathing on the actual street. He would like every bit of intelligence he could get to actually understand the school politics, or corpo politics as one might call it.
He chewed on it for a whole minute before an entirely different, entirely more strange thought clawed its way to the front.
‘One point after a whole level. I mean, if I add it to my cool, that’s adding one-third to my cool, whatever that was. If this is the rate I level up at, I should treat it better than the piece of mil-tech I have now.’ Especially when he didn’t even know why he leveled up, and now of all time. What did he do to level up? Sleep?
“...First, I will have to see if I can increase my stat with effort,” he decided, and the window obligingly folded itself. Apparently, now there was a new line in his profile called AP.
He pushed himself upright, joints complaining the whole way, and glanced at the HP bar out of habit more than anything.
87%.
Ken blinked. And blinked again.
“...87?”
He distinctly remembered it reading 87% right before, maybe after the nosebleed, and it’d have to have dropped a few points from there. Say, conservatively, somewhere in the 84s by the time he’d face-planted into whatever passed for sleep.
‘That’s not right.’ Overnight sleep after the surgery had put him back nearly forty percent in one stretch.
“Log.”
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...
You have leveled up!
Level: 1 → 2
You have gained 1 Attribute Point.
Assign now?
→ Yes / No
Party Member Lucyna Kushinada is partially linked with the RED Framework.
Link now? → Yes / No
You have grouped with chooms:
Lucyna Kushinada Lv. 7 / 95%
...
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
“Not there after all...” Ken scrolled, read it three times, half-expecting the entry to have hidden itself somewhere between the lines. Nothing. Not even the little double-circle error icon he’d learned to associate with ‘the system has problems but won’t share obediently.’
There was no Gamer’s Slumber, and neither was his abnormal healing.
“So, it was that after all.” He connected the dots. Moved to finish his morning routine as his brain pushed away the brain fog and searched for clues.
[GAMER’S SLUMBER Lv. 3] appeared only on his log. It was not in his skills, neither any notification told him about such authority. He didn’t have a lot of ideas, but something about the name gave him a strong one.
If it worked like how he thought it worked, he actually liked where it was headed. Either way, it was something he could confirm by tomorrow, unlike the stats. So he set it aside, and reached for his holo instead.
The call went through. Ken stared at that for a solid three seconds too.
<D: Hey.>
<Lucy: Took you long enough. Thought you actually ran off to Pacifica or something equally stupid.>
It was 11 AM. No wonder she would think that. Thank all that was holy, that it was Saturday.
<D: I was unconscious, not fleeing the country. Also, hey, good morning, hope you slept well–>
<Lucy: I will re-block you.>
<D: –got it. So no greeting, is perfectly fine.> She might as well be best of chooms with Carla now. <About the meeting.>
There was a pause long enough that Ken genuinely wondered if she’d made good on the threat.
<Lucy: Tomorrow, ok?>
<D: Is today a bad time?>
<Lucy: Today is fine. Are you that eager to get flatlined?>
<D: Nah, just want to finish it as soon as possible.>
<Lucy: Can you even get ready? You don’t have to visit Vik today since the other netrunner won’t be there.>
<D: Then I’m ready whenever you are.>
<Lucy: 8PM. I’ll send the location an hour before.>
<D: That cautious?>
<Lucy: That’s how it has to be. Don’t be seen coming from the same direction twice, don’t bring anything you’re not willing to lose, and don’t, for the love of every god you don’t believe in, try to be charming.>
<D: Is there any alien gods?> Ken frowned, when did he try to act charming? <For the record, I never tried to be charming.>
<Lucy: Tsk. Then I make no promises about what happens to you either. Maine doesn’t do patience well.>
<D: Noted. Thank you. For setting it up, I mean. And unblocking me.>
<Lucy: Don’t read into the unblocking, it was a necessity.>
<D: I’m reading into it a little.>
<Lucy: Then you need to read quieter.>
The line went dead on her end before he could get a reply in, which felt fitting, honestly. He found himself smiling anyway, a stupid, involuntary sort of thing, before he caught himself doing it and forcibly rearranged his face into something more dignified.
‘Tonight, that actually makes me nervous.’ But if they set the meeting for tomorrow, he would die of overthinking.
Ken swung his legs off the cot, testing weight on them slowly. Everything ached in the particular way that suggested his body agreed the last few days had been a lot, but nothing screamed at him hard enough to stop him standing.
He checked the date again, mostly for his own sanity.
Saturday.
No Meditation class to sit through, no Corporate Ethics droning through his skull, no forced lunch with Katsuo that would set him back another three hundred eddies for the privilege. Not that he had to penny pinch for that amount anymore, but still very much appreciated not spending lavishly when it wasn’t required.
Weekends at Arasaka Academy didn’t mean the doors were locked. The library stayed open, half the labs ran on a skeleton schedule for students chasing extracurricular credit, and the Game Club... apparently Chen Zhi and the others treated it as their official gathering day.
Which meant, if he timed it right, he had the day to game, leech off another meal at the cafeteria, think of a possible contingency plan and hopefully, finish this matter with whoever this Maine guy was, in a peaceful manner.
The gaming was by no means just an indulgence. It was proper research material, not only to find his system mechanics but also other countless functions.
‘Un, definitely not running away from confronting how to deal with a group of experienced cyberpunks. Yep, definitely not!’ was Ken’s forceful thought.
“One thing at a time,” Ken told the empty cubicle, and put his late mother’s EMT Jacket in his inventory. He was going to let it sit there for a long time. “Academy first. Panicking about mercs can wait till afternoon.”
He caught himself in the cracked bathroom mirror on the way out–a Japanese-American face, with the Asian traits standing stronger, light brown eyes, a bandage long gone from his forehead but the ghost of the memory still sitting there anyway.
No change there.
“...Right. Attribute point.” Actually, he leaned towards betting it on Body. He had Sandy. The stronger his body was, the more he could push it, and the harder and faster his fists would land. Still, the scarcity of the APs and not understanding the stats as whole limited his options. “Later. I feel like I only pushed out a lot of matters without solving most.”
He left it unassigned and walked out into the Saturday noon glare of Night City, already composing, somewhere in the back of his head, several increasingly bad excuses for why a suspended-then-reinstated street kid with a corpo uniform needed the Game Club’s games on his one day off.
/ / /
Honestly speaking, it was Ken’s first time in the Academy on his day off. To call it rare would be understatement. Though one look at the number of students in school uniform and you would hardly doubt that it was Saturday.
What surprised him even more was the giant mobile server in the middle of the club room.
In this era, the possible limit of data stored in a datachip or shards could be said to be staggering. For a game to require a server, Ken couldn’t help but get his hope up.
It looked like Chen Zhi didn’t exaggerate when he said it was their celebration day. The gathered Game Club members were five times more than he had expected. Only, it looked like they were all... dead?
“Oh,” then he realized they were all connected to the server.
<Ken: You there?>
<Chen: Ken? You’re late. We already finished two rounds. Everyone’s already mid-game. Sigh Forget it, find a foldable seat from the storage room, connect with the server and get used to the game. You good with shooting?>
<Ken: Err, Do I shoot after pressing the barrel on the forehead? I think I am master at it.>
<Chen: Haha, great. We have a genius. Guess you’re not standing out in this one!>
<Ken: So are we teaming up today?>
Chen: Pfft. Play solo. I don’t wanna lose with a genius like you.>
<Ken: Shut it.>
The games run similar to BDs, only now Ken was connected to an external server, while normal BDs use internal processing power from the neuroport.
He found the neural port, jacked it with the plug on his palm, and typed Ken_M into the handle field before the server could get any ideas of its own–and apparently it did. The moment he hit confirm, the world folded.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
YOU ARE GAMING!
GAMING SUPREMACY
DOMINANCE ASSERTED.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
‘Nice! This one triggered properly, and I’m not completely zoned out. Guess it’s really because of the multiplayer games.’
|| Connecting to external host...
|| FRONTLINE: BLACKWALL PROTOCOL
|| Server: NC-Local-07
|| Verifying local player...
|| Match found. Loading arena.
Then color, and weight, and a rifle already sitting warm in his hands like it had been waiting for him specifically.
Ken blinked at the sky first–a dead, ash-orange thing hanging over a skyline that was Night City’s if Night City had been gutted, looted, and left to rust for thirty years. Corroded megabuildings leaned into each other like drunks at last call. A NCART line ran overhead, tracks snapped clean in three places, cars still dangling from the gap like broken teeth.
Nice. Cheerful.
|| FRONTLINE: BLACKWALL PROTOCOL
|| Loadout: Standard Recruit
|| Class: Unassigned
|| Objective: Hold ICE-Point Delta
“Oh, it’s one of those,” Ken muttered, mostly to himself, as the tutorial box faded and dumped him unceremoniously into an alley with a rifle he’d never fired, an inventory tab that looked suspiciously familiar, and absolutely no idea which direction Delta was.
He had heard of these games. Hard to not know when the otakus would literally make a zone in the classroom and play it with the same fervor he read alien magazines with... damn, thinking about it made him crave alien knowledge.
<Chen: You alive over there? First match usually eats newbies whole.>
<Ken_M: Give me a sec, I’m still figuring out which end of the gun the bullets come out of.>
<Chen: ...You said you were good at this.>
<Ken_M: I said I was good at pressing the barrel to a forehead. That's a different skillset entirely.>
<Chen: Yeah?>
<Ken_M: Stop being sarcastic. Where’s Quinn and Erry? Not teaming with them today?>
<Chen: Academy fitness center. Both are called muscle-gonks for a reason. Left after two rounds, should be back though.>
<Ken_M: Wait, we have a fitness center.>
<Chen: ...>
Ok, that was an unnecessary question. He knew about it, but somewhere along the lines, he thought it was his school in Japan which had the fitness center. Yeah, his brain was definitely not braining there.
Bang
In the distance, gunfire was already cracking. Not the tinny arcade pop-pop-pop he half expected from a simulated game, but something with weight to it, echo and all, rolling off the dead buildings like the city itself was flinching.
Ken crept to the alley mouth and peered out.
|| Enemy Sighted. 40m. Cover Recommended.
The prompt blinked red at the edge of his vision, and half a second later a shape separated from behind a dumpster across the street, rifle already swinging toward him.
The fight and flight instinct in Ken’s body screamed Sandy, now, and something in his hindbrain actually reached for it and the world slowed.
‘TF am I doing?! I’m gaming here, don’t need Sandy!!!’ Ken facepalmed as the world resumed. Just because he was connected with the server didn’t mean he was completely detached from his body. That meant Sandy still responded like it did.
Not that his body could move at the speed it did in the real world. Unless the game incorporated such chrome settings.
Either way, that led to him missing the window. Took three simulated rounds to the chest and his game avatar–which was literally him–kneeled like a lawn chair.
He felt a little pain. They most likely set the pain sensitivity to 5%, with the maximum being 20%.
|| YOU DIED
|| Respawning in 30...29...28...
“...Right.” Ken lay there in the digital gutter, staring at a fake sky, feeling something between offense and genuine interest. “Right, let’s not get too serious. Play it cool. Cool. Cool cool cool. Good to know exactly how much of a crutch that thing actually is. But let’s try to enjoy it.”
<Chen: Was that you dying already?>
<Ken_M: That was a controlled experiment. Educational research if you may call it.>
<Chen: Sure it was, genius.>
He respawned back in the alley, and tried his best to stop Sandy from activating with every little warning he got from the game popup.
Instead, he actually looked, properly looked. The way he’d learned to look at Elena Gomez's arm crawling toward him at one-fifth speed, except here there was no slow world to lean on. Just his own eyes, his own read on the angle the enemy had peeled from, the half-second gap between shots when a rifle like that would need to cycle.
The second enemy came from the same dumpster. Ken had already moved.
He caught the guy mid-reload, put eight consecutive rounds into a chest that lit up with a satisfying red flash, and ducked back around the corner before the kill notification even finished rendering.
|| ELIMINATION: xX_ChromeFang_Xx
“Oh,” Ken said, blinking. <Ken_M: Hey, I might be a shooting genius after all.>
<Chen: Yeah? What level of gaming accuracy are you using?>
<Ken_M: What’s that?>
<Chen: Pfft. Serious now? Check your shooting correction log.>
<Ken_M: Shooting Correction?>
A game page popped up.
|| Shooting Correction Lv. Max is in use.
<Chen: It’s a game. If you suck in something, it will put some level of correction for immersion. Tell me the level. Lv. 1 or 2 means you’re actually real good and hit them even without correction. The damage is quite high. Lv. 5-7, yeah, you have some problems bro. As for above? I hardly doubt anyone here has that.>
<Ken_M: I see...> Ken decided.
<Chen: So, what level? Around 3-4?>
<Ken_M: Yeah, spot on.>
In this world some things were left best to be never found out.
{Alternative Titles: I Level Up by Sleeping; Point; Level up!; One Point; No Slumber This Time; Unblocked; Today, 8PM; The Cost of Eleven; A Day to Think; It’s Shooting Time; }